Tag Archives: Scotland

It’s been a while since I did a family history post so I thought it was about time I did one, so here you are.

Back in the 1980s a company called Halberts started up a business to exploit the then newly growing hobby of genealogy. They purported to be able to supply customers with accurate information about their family tree and to provide them with a coat of arms. In fact what they actually did was to supply customers with a book entitled the Book of XXX which was essentially a list of names and addresses of XXX culled from telephone directories around the world with a frontispiece claiming to give the history and origins of the name in question, together with a coat of arms. More often than not, these were incorrect. Their claim to respectability was that they had bought the right to use the name of Burke’s Peerage. What they actually did was cause a lot of confusion to fledgling family historians and to make it difficult for genuine family historians, in particular One-Name Studies to gain the trust of those who had fallen victim to the Halbert’s scam. Several articles have been written over the years about this scam and the company has been shut down several times but apparently has miraculous powers of regeneration and continues to pop back into existence. For an interesting read about this duplicitous company see for example: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2004/08/my_least_favori.html

Scams aside, our surname Leather, appears to cause the editors of surname dictionaries particular difficulties. For example, in the several dictionaries of English or British Surnames, the name is usually described as being derived from workers or sellers of leather such as this shown below from The Internet Surname Index http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Leather#ixzz2gSAekBD2

This is an English surname. Recorded as Leather, Lether, Leither, and probably other others, it has two distinct origins. Firstly it may derive from the pre 7th Century male given name “hleothar”, meaning a sound or melody. Though not recorded independently, this personal name forms the first element in such placenames as Leatherhead in Surrey; Letheringham in Suffolk and Letheringsett, Norfolk. These are recorded respectively as Leodridan in the Saxon Chartulary, dated 880, as Letheringaham in the Domesday Book of 1086, and as Letheringsete in the Pipe Rolls of Norfolkin 1254. In his famous book “Patronymica Britannica”, Lower states that “One Lethar was a bishop in the days of Ethelbert” (860 – 865). The surname may also have originated as a metonymic occupational name for a leatherworker or seller of leather goods, from the Middle English and Olde English “lether”, leather. Although the surname itself does not appear until the early 16th Century (see below), the word was used in such occupational names as “Lether-dyer” in London in 1373, and one John Lethercarver was noted in a descriptive catalogue of Ancient Deeds for Northamptonshire, and dated 1404. The modern surname is now found chiefly in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The first recorded spelling of the family name may be that of Robert Lether. This was dated 1524 in the “Subsidy Tax Rolls of Suffolk”, during the reign of King Henry V111, known as “Bluff King Hal”, 1509 – 1547.

If the writers of articles like this actually did their homework, they would realise that their hypothesis of it being a metonymic occupational name was nonsense. If it was an occupational name it would be spread throughout the country instead of being, as even the authors of the above state, that the name in now “found chiefly in the Lancashire and Yorkshire” regions of England. A quick look at the map below derived from the 1881 census data shows this very clearly.

Leather – 1881 per 100,000 people

A few years ago I decided, given the restricted distribution of our name, evidence seemed to suggest an origin near Winwick a town close to Warrington, that it would be very interesting to start a DNA surname study. Imagine my surprise to find that the name Leather was already registered, but as a derivative of the name Lauder! [due entirely to the misinformation given by Halberts] I was incensed and decided that this needed to be corrected immediately. Using the same sources http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Lauder#ixzz2gSATbi7f I was able to easily demonstrate that Lauder is a Scottish name recorded in the spellings of Lauder and Lauderdale, this is a famous Scottish locational surname. As Lauder it originates from the village of Lauder in the county of Berwickshire, and as Lauderdale from a name for the western district of the same county of Berwickshire. The translation of the place name and hence the later surname is believed to be from the French-Breton pre 7th century word “laour”, meaning a trench or ditch. The surname is one of the first recorded in Scotland, and early examples taken from authentic rolls and registers of the medieval period include: William de Lawedre, the sheriff of Perthshire in the reign of King Alexander IIIrd of Scotland (1249 – 1286), Alan de Lawadyr, who witnessed a charter by Stephen Fleming, master of the hospital of Soltre in 1426, and Johannes Lathirdale, a notary public, in the city of Glasgow in 1472. Other recordings include Sir David Luthirdale, archdeacon of Dunkeld in 1477, whilst William Lauder, given as being a literary forger, died in 1771. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Sir Robert de Lauedre. This was dated 1250, in the register of the Abbey of Dryburgh and from the map 1881 census data (see below)

Lauder – 1881 per 100,000 people

it is pretty clear that the surnames Leather and Lauder are distinct and non-overlapping.

This story does have a happy ending. As a result of this analysis I was able to get Leather registered as a separate DNA-surname study, although sad to say the various surname dictionaries have not yet manged to change their entries, but I continue to live in hope 🙂

Between 1982 and 1992 I worked as a research and advisory entomologist for the UK Forestry Commission based at their Northern Research Station just outside Edinburgh. For the first five years of my time there I worked almost exclusively on the pine beauty moth, Panolis flammea. The pine beauty moth is

a native insect that became a pest of a non-native tree, Pinus contorta, then a tree that was widely planted over northern Britain. The majority of planting in Scotland was in the north and this meant that my study sites were in Sutherland and Caithness and Aberdeenshire. My main experimental forest was west of Aberdeen in the Spey valley (very handy for the whisky trail) in the Elchies block of Criagellalchie Forest.

My experimental forest with nearby distillery marked 😉

In Mid-January 1984, I headed north to do some maintenance on my head capsule collecting funnel traps.

In those days, snow was a perennial hazard, even in the south of Scotland and as I progressed northwards the drifts at the side of the road became increasingly higher. When I reached the forest gates, it was obvious that I was not going to be able to drive to my site. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and the snow glistened. A perfect day for a walk, albeit one of 10 km. Luckily, the weather had been sunny for the last couple of days so the snow was mostly hard enough to walk on. Only in a few places did I break the surface and find that I was standing on about a metre depth of snow. Two hours later as I was approaching my field site, squinting against the sun bouncing off the white untouched snow, I saw black spots moving on the surface. My immediate thought was that I was suffering the first stages of snow-blindness, but as I got nearer I saw that the black dots were actually insects. At first sight I thought I was hallucinating, was this some strange bizarre form of life perhaps an aphid-fly hybridization experiment gone wrong? On closer examination I realised that I was looking at wingless Mecopterans.

I collected a few to send off for identification and confirmation and carried on into the depths of the forest to check on my funnels. On returning to civilization a day or so later I sent my specimens off to the Natural History Museum and shortly after was informed that I had they were the snow flea, Boreus hyemalis and that I had extended the recorded range of this particular species, albeit only by a few miles.

My record – it lasted 10 years as the furthest north before M.S.C. Elliott recorded it in February 1994 in Easter Fearn in the north-west Highlands.

Distribution of Boreus hyemalis in 1994; my record, then the furthest North.

Current recorded distribution of Boreus hyemalis – obviously widespread – just lacking people willing to go and look for it in the winter 🙂

So what is a snow flea. It is of course, not a flea, being a Mecopteran or Scorpion fly, albeit non-winged. In Britain there are three species with wings (in the genus Panorpa), the larvae and adults both being predatory on other insects. The adult snow flea is about 5mm long, and lives among moss on which it feeds as both a larva and adult (Withycombe, 1922, 1926). Interestingly, the BugLife site states that they are predatory in both the larval and adult stage. I am not sure where they got this information as they do not cite a reference and all the published literature I have seen indicates that they are moss feeders (Withycombe, 1922, 1926; Fraser, 1943; Hågvar, 2010). Indeed, Wthycombe (1922) conducted a series of experiments on the larvae and conclusively demonstrated that they were unable to complete their development unless fed on moss, although the adults will apparently also feed on dead insects.

These are true winter-active insects, adults emerging in October and November when they mate and lay their eggs the eggs at the base of moss plants), Polytrichium commune being the preferred host (Fraser, 1943). The eggs start to hatch in November and the larvae forage within the moss clumps, pupating towards the end of the summer, emerging as adults after 6-8 weeks. The adults, which are wingless, thus come out in the coldest months of the year, usually between October and April. They are most easily seen when walking or jumping on the snow surface. Considering that the adults are winter-active they have a surprisingly high super-cooling point (-6.5oC) (Sömme & Östbye, 1969), especially when compared with the cereal aphid, Sitobion avenae, which has a super-cooling point of -24oC but rarely survives English winters (Knight & Bale, 1986). The BugLife site wonders “how they (snow fleas) manage to jump up to 5 cm without muscular hind legs” but Burrows (2011) found that their jumping prowess is by virtue of large depressor muscles within the thorax which enables them to jump distances of up to 10 cm with a take-off velocity of 1 m s-1, indicating a force of about 16 times their body weight. So aptly named in this respect too.

The Snow flea is not found (or at least has not been recorded) in the mild south-west of Britain, seeming to prefer areas with a harsher winter. Climate warming may thus pose a threat for this intriguing and little studied insect. Perhaps it is time for us all to venture out in mid-winter and start scanning the surface of snow drifts in heathland areas for these elusive creatures before it is too late.

Mention silk and most people will, I guess, immediately think of spiders and cobwebs.

Pressed a bit further, some may mention silkworms, and some might even know the word sericulture and that the common silkworm feeds on mulberry bushes. What they may not know, is that the silk worm is the larvae of the moth Bombyx mori and that there are actually four species of lepidopteran larvae commonly used in silk production. These are pictured below in the lovely illustration from Meyers Konversations-Lexikon; next to the picture are some B. mori larvae.

Silk production is of course not just a feature of spiders and lepidoptera. It is a widespread feature of insect life, being used for pupal cases, as a mode of transport (ballooning) as shown by larvae of the gypsy moth and other species of Lepidoptera,

protective cases as in larval caddis flies or also, by some caddis fly larvae, as fishing equipment.

But in my opinion, the most dramatic use of silk is that seen in a genus of micro-moths, belonging to the Yponomeutidae, the small ermine moths, Yponomeuta. They and their relatives, are silk-producers extraordinaire. Collectively, they are known as small ermine moths; so called because of their adult colouration which resembles the ermine worn by nobility and small, because of the existence of several larger moths with ermine in their names.

My particular favourite is the bird cherry ermine moth, and not just because the bird cherry is my favourite tree. (My eldest son’s middle name is bird cherry, albeit in Finnish). The adult moths lay their eggs in August, in clusters of up to 100 or so on young twigs of the bird cherry Prunus padus, cover them with an egg shield and then die (Leather, 1986). The eggs hatch shortly afterwards and the larvae spend the winter under the egg shield until the following spring. When the buds begin to burst in spring, the larvae emerge from beneath the shield and begin to feed gregariously on the newly emerging leaves, spinning a web that protects them from natural enemies and may also help in thermoregulation and as a trail indicator (Kalkowski, 1958) http://edepot.wur.nl/201846 . It is possible to have great fun by selecting a lead larvae to act as a trail blazer and watch the rest of the colony follow them to a destination you have chosen.

Every three to four years or so, populations of the moths get so high that they exhaust their food supplies, defoliating entire trees and covering them with a tough coating of silky white webbing (Leather, 1986; Leather & Mackenzie, 1994). In fact, in Finland, I once saw three neighbouring trees totally enveloped in a silken tent caused by the bird cherry ermine moth, Yponomeuta evonymellus, that you could enter and shelter inside from the rain. Once they really get going as spring progresses, the landscape, particularly if in an area where bird cherry is common, begins to take on a somewhat wintry look, which for May is a little odd. Those of who you, who have travelled north of Perth in Scotland, on the A9, will be familiar with this phenomenon. It frequently makes the Scottish newspapers and generates headlines such as “winter wonderland” or “ghostly landscape”. As they run out of trees, the larvae begin to migrate in a desperate search for trees with leaves still on them, and by now, have become less fussy about what they eat. It is at this wandering stage of their life that the true extent

of their singlemindedness (I have seen a trail of thousands of larvae marching along a railway line; they didn’t survive the passing of the 0850 from Helsinki) and their ability to produce silk becomes startlingly apparent.

Welcome to the lounge, where entomologists and insect enthusiasts can relax, grab a cup and put on a nice music. Step out of your day job, and step into your zone, where you reconnect with your passion for insects and enrich yourself with more knowledge.